A Graphical View of Student Patterns in MOOCs. Last week Phil Hill wrote a blog post about four types of students in MOOCs. He identified four types: Lurkers – This is the majority of students within xMOOCs, where people enroll but just observe or sample a few items at the most. Many of these students do not even get beyond registering for the MOOC or maybe watching part of a video.Passive Participants – These are students who most closely align with traditional education students, viewing a course as content to consume.
Personnally I recognise these types and I think it is useful to keep these types in mind when you are developing a MOOC. I also see that people can be one type in a certain MOOC and another type in another. An important point is that some students change between patterns – such as a passive participant deciding to fully jump in and become an active participant, or even an active participant becoming frustrated and becoming a lurker. This week Phil also created a nice graphical view of the pattern of these types: The Plusses and Pitfalls of Teaching Online. Dan Ariely is not just a great and funny teacher, but he’s dedicated his life to making the world a somewhat better place. To that end, he’s produced an online course on behavioral economics that already has attracted 140,000 students.
Ilustration of Dan Ariely by Coursera. A Note from Paul Solman: Behavioral psychologist and good friend of Making Sense Dan Ariely has written today’s post, introducing his new free online course on behavioral economics. Dan was featured on The Business Desk most recently when he explained “Why Our Brains Might Not Be Able to Resist Black Friday” — that is, why some of us can’t stop shopping. It elaborated on an observation he made when we interviewed him, his kids and Sesame Street’s Grover, among others, about the nearly irresistible allure of instant gratification, a story subsequently sampled on the Stephen Colbert show, necessitating a response from myself, Dan and family. Dan also appeared on PBS NewsHour during harder times. Related Content: MOOC completion rates {Select only Coursera in facet Filter by platform}
Atomic Training: BYOD By The Numbers. Infographic: How Has the Internet Changed Education? Email Share December 23, 2011 - by Sarah Cargill 0 Email Share At Getting Smart, we discuss often how the Internet, personal digital learning, social media and other technology tools are changing the face of education. Today, students have access to an abundance of information, knowledge and resources over the Web.
Today’s infographic, “How has the Internet Changed Education?” Faculty and students in higher education are using social media, online videos, blogs and more to instruct students in classes. For more, view the infographic below: MIT Now Granting Official Certificates For Their Free Online Courses. This is big. M.I.T., the hub of education and technology where innovations seem to happen on an hourly basis… has just unveiled the future of online education. Basically, you can now earn official credits toward an M.I.T. certificate by taking their free and online courses.
The school is calling the program “MITx” reminiscent of TEDx. I wouldn’t be surprised if the trend-setting M.I.T. pushes brick-and-mortar schools to also grant official certifications to those that can demonstrate a mastery of the subjects being taught online. A story in this morning’s New York Times has all the details (embedded below) and is worth examining. MITx While students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pay thousands of dollars for courses, the university will announce a new program on Monday allowing anyone anywhere to take M.I.T. courses online free of charge — and for the first time earn official certificates for demonstrating mastery of the subjects taught.
Mr. An Online Learning Community. Effective Online Teaching & Training | Where Online Trainers Increase Connection, Engagement and Enjoyment. Daniel Pink's Think Tank: Flip-thinking – the new buzz word sweeping the US. The Lairds of Learning. How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers? By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 30th August 2011 Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the Western world?
Whose monopolistic practices makes WalMart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch look like a socialist? You won’t guess the answer in a month of Sundays. Everyone claims to agree that people should be encouraged to understand science and other academic research. You might resent Murdoch’s paywall policy, in which he charges £1 for 24 hours of access to the Times and Sunday Times. Of course, you could go into the library (if it still exists). Murdoch pays his journalists and editors, and his companies generate much of the content they use. The returns are astronomical: in the past financial year, for example, Elsevier’s operating-profit margin was 36% (£724m on revenues of £2 billion)(8).
More importantly, universities are locked into buying their products. Www.monbiot.com References: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 7. 8. 9. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. Evidence of Learning Online: Assessment Beyond The Paper. Assessment | Viewpoint Evidence of Learning Online: Assessment Beyond The Paper Discussions of technology strategy and planning for new media at colleges and universities are informed by many factors of higher education culture and the way its core constituents--faculty and students--work and learn. One rapidly evolving area is online assessment, whether for fully online programs or for blended learning environments. Here, learning designer Judith Boettcher examines online assessment strategies beyond the traditional end-of-term paper.
In designing courses for online environments we have been somewhat successful at scuttling closed-book exams for assessing student learning--largely due to the challenges of monitoring exams. Why is the traditional paper so prevalent in assessment, and how can we move beyond it to alternative evidence of student learning? Students often dread writing papers and respond enthusiastically to alternatives that demonstrate what they know and understand. How Technology Wires the Learning Brain. Kids between the ages of 8 and 18 spend 11.5 hours a day using technology — whether that’s computers, television, mobile phones, or video games – and usually more than one at a time. That’s a big chunk of their 15 or 16 waking hours. But does that spell doom for the next generation? Not necessarily, according to Dr. Gary Small, a neuroscientist and professor at UCLA, who spoke at the Learning & the Brain Conference last week.
“Young people are born into technology, and they’re used to using it 24/7,” Small said. “The technology train has left. The downside of such immersion in technological devices, he said, is that they’re not having conversations, looking people in the eye, or noticing verbal cues. But that’s not the headline here. Video games, for example, aren’t just about repetitive tasks – many of them have built-in social components that allow kids to communicate.
“Texting is an expression of what it means to be human,” Small said. “We can train empathic behavior,” he said. Related. Does Technology Make Us More Productive Workers? - Technology. Student Research: Can Googling Replace $168 Intro to Psych Textbook? Electronic Textbooks | News Student Research: Can Googling Replace $168 Intro to Psych Textbook? By Dian Schaffhauser02/16/11 Students are taking the battle against high-priced textbooks into their own hands. This week, 11 University of Cincinnati seniors in the psychology program presented at an Educause event a comparison of the content of traditional college texts, one of which costs $168, to content they found for free on the Web. The research effort was undertaken as part of the Digital Bookshelf Project, the University System of Ohio's effort to make textbooks more affordable. For the latest research project, which took place in fall 2010, the students compared the value and educational quality of two current textbooks with the draft of a new textbook they found free online, along with what they could find through online search engines.
They worked under the guidance of Charles Ginn, an associate professor of psychology at U Cincinnati. About the Author. App Fusion: Learning Face-off with Facebook by Terrence Wing. "This is not to say that Facebook is the end-all and that you should abandon your LMS. There are privacy concerns with proprietary information that you need to consider.
This learning option should not be considered in every situation. However, there are great opportunities for Facebook to be a great learning catalyst that keeps everyone from the learner to the bean counter happy. " Wikipedia reports that there are over 500 million users now on the social networking giant, Facebook. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told TechCrunch at the World Economic Forum in 2010 that 175 million people log into Facebook every day. This appears to be great news for Mark Zuckerberg and his army of investors. It’s all in the context Let’s get some definitions out of the way to establish a consistent context for this thesis. A content management system (CMS) is the collection of procedures used to manage workflow in a collaborative environment.
Many social media sites fall into the CMS category. Biology | 7.012 Introduction to Biology, Fall 2.